Windows XP Professional: The Missing Manual

Windows Media Player

You can use Windows Media Player—one of the most useful freebie features of Windows XP—to play sounds, play digital movies, or tune in to Internet radio stations. It’s the Grand Central Station for digital music and movies, as well as the junction for your hard drive, CD player, CD burner, MP3 player, and the Internet (from which you can download new music files and movie clips).

It’s easy to see how excited Microsoft is about version 8, since shortcuts connecting you to it are everywhere. It appears in two different Start menu locations (including the Start→All Programs→Accessories→Entertainment submenu) and on the Quick Launch toolbar. In any case, you can use a different method for opening Windows Media Player every other day.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONScanning Text—and Then Editing It

I scanned an article from a magazine. How do I copy a couple of paragraphs from it into my word processor?

When you scan an article or book, you’re not capturing text. You’re just taking a picture of text. You can no more copy and paste a paragraph out of the resulting graphic file than you could copy text out of a photograph. Your PC sees everything on the scanned page as one gigantic graphic.

If you do want to edit text that you’ve scanned, then you need optical character recognition ( OCR ) software, which comes free with certain scanners. This kind of software analyzes the patterns of dots in each scanned graphics file, and does a fairly good job of turning it into a word ...